Roger started following the work of Joshua Dienstag, University of California, Los Angeles, Political Science.
Roger started following the work of Frederick Dolan, California College of the Arts, Visual and Critical Studies.
Roger started following the journal Political Theory.
Papers
Assassinating Justly: Reflections on Justice and Revenge in the Osama Bin Laden Killing
Assassinating Justly: Reflections on Justice and Revenge in the Osama Bin Laden Killing in Law, Culture & the Humanities Volume 7 Issue 3, October 2011
http://lch.sagepub.com/content/7/3/346.full.pdf+html
Assassination has always been part of war and in recent years it has played increasingly important roles in United States military policy. The assassination of Osama bin Laden offers itself as an example of an assassination that nevertheless claims to be just. Comparing the bin Laden assassination with the assassination of Simon Petlura by Sholom Schwartzbard in 1927 and the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, this article argues that assassinations, which under certain conditions are justified under international law, can also be just, but only when they are accompanied by the risk of a jury trial.
Download (.pdf) Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
The Handbook of Human Rights, ed. by Thomas Cushman (Routledge, 2011)
This article explores Hannah Arendt’s critique and reformulation of human rights in three parts. Part One offers a summary of Arendt’s critique of human rights as she develops it in the central chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Part Two explores the intellectual foundations of Arendt’s reconstruction of human rights as the “the right to have rights” in her concept of natality, the core condition of human being. Finally, Part Three, engages Arendt’s effort in Eichmann in Jerusalem to think clearly about how international law might meaningfully understand the crime of “crimes against humanity.”
Solitude and the Activity of Thinking
Published in
Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics
ed. by Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan
Fordham University Press (2010)
Abstract: This paper reflects on the political importance of the activity of thinking and suggests that Arendt’s space of politics may not be limited to its traditional abode within the public realm. Beyond the public realm of politics, Arendt’s defense of political action requires attention to the private as well. What has been overlooked amidst all the attention to Arendt’s defense of the public realm of politics over and against the rise of the social is her equally strong insistence upon a vibrant and secure private realm where active thinking is possible. Arendt’s private realm is a space of solitude that is the necessary prerequisite for the activity of thinking. Indeed, it is solitude that nurtures and fosters thoughtfulness and thus prepares individuals for the possibility of political action. To create a meaningful politics amidst the loneliness of the modern world, Arendt suggests, requires solitude, which she sees as the cradle of thinking.
Approaching Infinity: Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon
Published in Philosophy and Literature, (October 2009).
Human dignity underlies human rights and is a pillar of liberal politics. Yet what is dignity? And what is the place of dignity in politics? Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a searing inquiry into the conflict between dignity and reason as opposing grounds of politics. Koestler shows how a rationalist politics corrodes dignity. In response, he imagines dignity as a countermeasure to reason. Political action, he suggests, must be informed by a non-rational and non-religious appeal to the infinite that is the one guarantee of a human politics. There is no justice, Koestler argues, divorced from infinite justice.
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Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
Published in Theoretical Inquiries in Law, v. 8.1 (2006).
This Article explores the unacknowledged impact of the scientific provenance of modern law. Justice, I argue, is threatened by social scientific thinking that subordinates justice to legitimacy, efficiency, and fairness. In doing so, I contest the conventional wisdom that positive law originates not with science but with democracy. In addition, I show that the power of the asserted connection between positive law and democracy depends upon a dangerous blurring of the distinction between justice and legitimacy. Finally, I offer an alternative genealogy of positive law that shows modern law to have been transformed into a science. My hope is that by pointing to the threatened loss of justice as an ideal, my work can help to hold open the possibility that law reclaim its foundation in the art of judgment instead of the science of law.
Revolutionary Constitutionalism
Published Originally as: "Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Some Thoughts on Laurie Ackermann's Dignity Jurisprudence," Acta Juridica (2008).
Reprinted in Dignity, Freedom and the Post-Apartheid Legal Order, ed. by Alfred Barnard (Jutta, 2009).
Beginning with an inquiry into South African Constitutional Court Justice Laurie Ackerman's development of a revolutionary dignity jurisprudence, this paper seeks to develop Arendt's own understanding of revolutionary jurisprudence through a reading of her book "On Revolution."
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Should We Justify War?
This is a draft for a keynote address for a 2012 Conference on Theorizing Just War. Comments welcome.
At stake in the effort to justify war is not simply some academic exercise. We ought not to aim for a series of justifications, legal or ethical, that will answer the question of when wars are justified and how they may be justly fought. War, like any deeply human activity, will exceed all efforts by humans to control and to regulate it. What is needed, rather, is a determination to recall that justice, and not merely strategy and utility, has a place in war. Instead of justifications, what just war thinking offers is the insistent determination that those who fight not blind themselves to the illumination of justice amidst the fog of war.
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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE CODE OF MANU, AND THE ART OF LEGISLATION
Originally Published in Cardozo Law Review (2003).
Re-published in "New Nietzsche Studies" (2005-2006).
This essay explores the emergence of a science of law through a close reading of Nietzsche’s writings on law and art. Against the belief that scientific truth leads to justice, Nietzsche affirms the necessity of illusion and error. The essay argues that Nietzsche’s reconceptualization of law as a work of art opens the possibility of a non-positivist idea of law beyond science, morality, and politics.
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Bearing Logs on Our Shoulders: Reconciliation, Judgment, and the Building of a Common World
Published in Theory & Event 14.1
On her first return visit to Germany in 1950, Hannah Arendt went walking in the Black Forest with Martin Heidegger. They discussed revenge, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Upon her return to New York, Arendt began her diary of thoughts, her Denktagebuch. The first seven pages of Arendt’s Denktagebuch argue that only reconciliation—and not revenge or forgiveness—is one essential example of political judgment. The connection between reconciliation and judgment means that only reconciliation, and not revenge or forgiveness, can respond to wrongs in a way that fosters the political project of building and preserving a common world.
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